Alice Henry was an Australian suffragist, journalist and trade unionist. She was a member of the Women's Trade Union League.
Background
Alice Henry was born on March 21, 1857 in Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. She was the oldest of three children of Margaret (Walker) Henry, a seamstress, and Charles Ferguson Henry, an accountant and a Swedenborgian in religion, who had married soon after they emigrated from Glasgow, Scotland, in 1852.
Education
Henry attended common and private schools in Melbourne, received private instruction in literature and logic, and studied and did pupil teaching at the Educational Institute for Ladies.
Career
In 1884 Henry began writing newspaper pieces. Soon afterward she joined the staff of the Australasian, and thereafter worked upward on the journalistic ladder by turning out society notes, recipes, and features for this weekly and its affiliated daily, the Melbourne Argus. She became interested in reforms affecting the condition of workers, women, and handicapped children. By the turn of the century, her parents having died some years before, Alice Henry had few ties in Australia and felt free to explore new countries overseas. In 1905, at the age of forty-eight, she sailed for England. For the next six months she studied workers' education, heard Bernard Shaw speak and the suffragist Christabel Pankhurst agitate.
Then, at the urging of the many Americans she had met in her travels, she set out for the United States with a mere $150, hoping to find employment, and arrived in January 1906. Friends in reform circles arranged speaking and writing assignments. She shared the platform with such notables as Edwin Markham and Susan B. Anthony, talking about wage boards and woman suffrage in Australia. Jane Addams summoned her to Hull House to help in a drive for the municipal vote for women in Chicago. Alice Henry was then at "the height of her powers, a newspaperwoman of ability, a feminist, an ardent supporter of labor".
At the request of Margaret Dreier Robins, president of the National Women's Trade Union League (founded in 1903), Alice Henry became secretary of the League's Chicago office. The monthly Union Labor Advocate provided rent-free desk space, and in 1908 Henry was invited to start a women's section in this paper. In January 1911 the League launched its own monthly, Life and Labor, with Alice Henry as editor. Her opening editorial declared that the new publication would strive to "bring the working girl into fuller and larger relationship with life on all sides. "
For four and one-half years she filled its pages with factual reports about working women, firsthand accounts of their strikes and their national and worldwide organizational activities. Her editorship reflects a turbulent time marked by such significant strikes involving women as the New York shirtwaist makers' and cloakmakers' strikes of 1909 and 1910 and the walkout of men's-wear workers in Chicago in 1910. The conduct and consequences of these conflicts were analyzed in detail in Life and Labor; so too, in 1911, were the causes of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York City, which took 146 lives. These and other aspects of the cause of working women she set forth also in her two books, The Trade Union Woman (1915) and Women and the Labor Movement (1923).
Alice Henry left her editorial post in June 1915 to take on lecturing and secretarial assignments for the League's educational department. From 1920 to 1922 she was director of its school to train working women in the art of effective union leadership. She was course lecturer at the first Bryn Mawr Summer School for Workers in 1921. She returned to Europe in 1924 to survey workers' education and then went on to Australia for a year's stay.
Back in the United States, she moved because of illness to Santa Barbara, California, where she lived from 1928 to 1933. Returning to Australia in 1933, she died there ten years later in a Melbourne rest home.
Membership
Henry was a member of the Women's Trade Union League.
Personality
An associate, Pauline Newman of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, remembered Henry as "white-haired and warm-hearted but always terribly serious about the cause of the working girl. "